My research interests have been dominated by two major experiences: 1) a serendipitous childhood encounter with Sámi reindeer herders in the Swedish mountains which launched me into an anthropological career, and 2) an inspirational travel/study year around the world during my BA program at Harvard led by anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson. As a result, my scholarly production has grown from a concentration on Sámi culture and livelihoods to embrace comparative aspects of reindeer economies throughout the circumpolar area. This in turn has caused me to immerse myself in studies of indigenous rights, ethnicity and political ecology in general.

I have lived among Sámi reindeer herders for extensive periods of time in Sweden, Norway and the Kola Peninsula of Russia, have studied the determinants of change in reindeer herding practices and also the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, have worked as a reindeer herder in Alaska with the Inuit NANA Regional Corporation herd, and been chairman of the Swedish Minority Rights Group and expert advisor on Sámi affairs to Sweden’s first two ombudsmen against ethnic discrimination. Because of a general systems perspective inspired by Bateson, my work has been devoted to jerking the studies of reindeer herding away from a dominance of descriptive “culturology” of traditional ways with accompanying historical categorizations into analytical forms of study based on the recognition of embedded hierarchies of resource/consumer relationships and property regimes to enable comparative work across time and space.

I have recently retired to become Professor Emeritus, but continue work to complete both my long-term project on the social effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster for the Swedish Saami and the international CLUE project noted above concerning the situation of the small (indigenous) peoples of northern Russia in Post-Soviet times.

As I gradually free myself from academic writing, I hope to return more frequently to my Saami fieldwork home in the Jokkmokk area and write for a more general readership about experiences “up north”—all the while indulging my desires to practice the Eskimo Roll in my kayak, to play the saxophone, and to pursue my new fascination with Taichi.

How might gender matter? (With Rasmussen, R.) In: SLiCA: Arctic living conditions Living conditions and quality of life among Inuit, Saami and indigenous peoples of Chukotka and the Kola Peninsula, ed. Birger Poppel. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers.Read article

2015

Survey design and sampling problems (with Lewis, D). In: SLiCA: Arctic living conditions Living conditions and quality of life among Inuit, Saami and indigenous peoples of Chukotka and the Kola Peninsula, ed. Birger Poppel. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers.Read article

2015

The Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic (SLiCA) as deployed in Sweden – initial issues. (with Lewis, D., Rasmussen, R., Roto, J.). In: SLiCA: Arctic living conditions Living conditions and quality of life among Inuit, Saami and indigenous peoples of Chukotka and the Kola Peninsula, ed. Birger Poppel. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers.Read article

Devitalization and Revitalization of Traditional Saami Dwellings in Sweden. In About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North, eds. Robert Wishardt Virginie Vaté and David Anderson. New York: Berghahn books.Read article

2013

Foreword, to Demant Hatt, E., With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman among the Sami, 1907-1908. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

2012

Milk and Antlers: A System of Partitioned Rights and Multiple Holders of Reindeer in Northern China. In Who Owns The Stock? Collective and Multiple Property Rights in Animals, eds. Anatoly M. Khazanov and Günther Schlee. New York: Berghahn Books.Read article

2012

Nordic Reflections on Northern Social Research. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, eds. Ullrick Kockel, Mairead Nic Craith, and Jonas Frykman. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Read article

When Push Comes to Shove: The Political and Moral Discourse of Rapid Climatic Change. Remarks made at the IPY meeting in Oslo, June 2010, in Arctic Studies Center Newsletter, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, May.Read article

Straining at Gnats and Swallowing Reindeer: the Politics of Ethnicity and Environmentalism in Northern Sweden. In: Green Arguments and Local Subsistence, ed. G. Dahl. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology.Read article

Coping with the Chernobyl disaster: a comparison of social affects in two reindeer-herding areas. In: Rangifer, Scientific Journal of Reindeer and Reindeer Husbandry. Special Issue No. 3, pp. 25-34. (From a paper presented at the 5th International Reindeer/Caribou Symposium in Arvidsjaur, August 1988.)Read article

1989

En samisk forårsvandring set fra venstre. In: Jordens Folk. Nr. 1. produced by the Danish Ethnographic Society in cooperation with the Institute for Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.Read article